There is a lot of stuff flying around up there! Thousands of satellites and used rocket boosters and space junk in Earth orbit, and planes, balloons, helicopters and birds at altitudes from several hundred to many thousands of feet. There is also lots of other stuff, like seeds, and trash and debris that gets carried into the air and blown around.

So, what did I capture in this video? I know for sure the first transit is the ISS because of the timing, and because I saw it visually, and because several of us captured images of it crossing the face of the Moon.

What are the other two objects? My best guess is some other satellites or rocket boosters, also in low orbit around the Earth. I say this because their size and speed is very similar to the ISS in the video.

If you happen to be a satellite expert, note that the timing of the other two object’s transits in the video is not accurate in relation to the transit of the ISS. There were several seconds that I edited out to make the video shorter and the file size smaller. This is also why the position of the Moon jumps a little bit after the ISS transit.

I don’t have an exact frame rate, nor exact time stamps accurate to a tenth of a second for individual frames. I started the video running at about 22:26:19 edt, and it ran until about 22:27:56 edt. The time stamp on the frames should be accurate to about 1 second as I synced the camera time to the NIST / UNSO time server before I left home for the transit.

The video recorded a total of 1000 frames in these 97 seconds, so it was recording roughly 10 frames per second. However, I am sure the framing rate was changing because the spacing of the ISS between frames where it is recorded is not consistent. This is probably due to the processor load and the backlog in writing files to the hard drive.

In real time, the ISS is recorded on frames 249 to 254. Calsky had this transit as occurring at 22:26:44.62s for the centerline location nearest to our observing location, which was about 2,000 feet south of this. The second object is recorded on frames 501 to 508, which at 10fps roughly would be 25 seconds later. The third object is recorded on frames 560 to 567,which at 10fps would be roughly another 6 seconds later. A different amount of frames were recorded for each object because of their angle across the field of view.

The video is comprised of 82 BMP frames taken with the C80 refractor working at f/32 with eyepiece projection. It was captured through Images Plus and the Live View video feed at 1x from my Canon 1000D (Digital Rebel XS).

Individual frames, each about 1 megabyte (768 x 512 pixels) were sharpened in Photoshop. They were them made into an AVI video (120 megabytes) with the freeware program StarTrails. They were then converted to a Flash video (1.3 megabytes) with DVDVideoSoft’s free video to Flash converter.

Note that the 1000D (Digital Rebel XS) does not have the capability of recording video in the camera on the memory card like most of the latest generation of DSLR cameras. These cameras can record 1020p or 720p video at high definition. The 1000D can not do this. Another observer at our site, Jim, recorded the transit with his T1i in high-definition video through his telescope, and it came out very nice.

Cameras like the 1000D that have Live Video can, however, capture this video feed with a program like Images Plus. However, this video is very low in resolution. The video frames I captured were only 768 x 512 pixels at 1x magnification from the Live View. This compares to the camera sensors true native resolution of 3888 x 2592 pixels.

This seemingly low resolution can be useful if you want to shoot planetary images where the planet size is very small to start with. If you magnify the Live View to 5x, you can get close to 1:1 resolution off the sensor, which is what you need for high-resolution planetary photography. It’s probably not the absolute best way to shoot planetary, but if you already have a DSLR with Live View, it’s nice to play around with, such as this image of Jupiter that I shot with the Live View on the 1000D and just a 70mm refractor.